As long as PHP has existed, developers have tried various hacks to make it faster than it was at the time.

From good-old eAccelerator, through HHVM, to modern initiatives like FrankenPHP, Roadrunner and ePHPm — this talk gives a historical overview over how the community tried to squeeze more performance out of PHP, and what the PHP project itself did to make PHP’s performance competitive with other mainstream web languages.

The main focus of this talk is on modern approaches like FrankenPHP and the application server model, but on the way there, we’ll also look at how PHP actually executes code (from parsing and opcode compilation to the JIT compiler), so you’ll understand why and how these tools work.